Mississippi Quarterly

Vorticism and Iron

Though architecture has been part of scholarship on Faulkner, there has yet to be a substantial exploration of Faulkner's architectures in relation to the experiencing body. Hagood's Faulkner's Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth (2008) and Thomas S. Hines's William Faulkner and the Tangible Past (1997) have significantly prepared space for further writing on Faulkner and architecture. "Mirrors" has been interpreted and situated for its enduring representations of disability, race, and southern urbanism in Faulkner's literary imagination.⁴ I suggest that "Mirrors" represents an interrelation of body, motion, and building evident in Faulkner's later work. The aesthetic and ontological circumscription of the body by New Orleans architecture in "Mirrors" is the beginning of Faulkner's long thematic and philosophical engagement with other southern architectures in continuous conversation. He engages relevant histories and politics of bodies and structures in dialogues of movement. [End Page 63]

Faulkner sketches competing architectural philosophies which implicate new and contested definitions of property and building. "Mirrors" correlates bodily movement with building, mechanization, and the use of tools. In this pattern, which can be found throughout his writings, Faulkner shows the body as a tool that has been fashioned from a lifetime of work. Architectural and aesthetic schools invoked by Faulkner in "Mirrors," namely Vorticist and Romantic, are codified in the lines of the worker's body and in nineteenth-century New Orleans iron railings. Faulkner's worker embodies a new type of building made possible beyond material structures using the body alone.

Ed's use of his own body as a means to foregoing traditional concrete boundaries and creating his own thresholds is a precedent of bodybuilding relations in Faulkner's writings. His later characters create space with their bodies in various settings. The ability of enslaved people, African Americans, and white women to transcend architectural boundaries established within structures of empire, power, and legacy appears in both urban and rural settings. Faulkner foregrounds slave architecture in his fiction as an alternative to imperial southern building and its potential for authentic civilization.⁵ Both Tomey's Turl in Go Down, Moses and Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury actively use their bodies to build spaces of freedom for themselves.⁶

Faulkner's representation of Ed's building his own space with his body is not isolated, but rather emblematic of Faulkner's later architectural understandings in which imperial architectures are symbols of civilization in decline. Thomas Sutpen's "baronial splendor" is placed in conversation with the "jungle" of rural Mississippi. Faulkner looks on with hope at the natural shelters of enslaved people finally freed and living in caves in The Unvanquished. Similarly, the scene in Light in August in which Lena Grove and Byron Bunch travel along the road beyond domestic space is the optimistic alternative to the doomed Gail Hightower and Joanna Burden in their imperial nests of isolation. Faulkner emphasizes the vagrant's superior powers of mobility and [End Page 64] transcendence of architectural obligation. Given the repeated dynamic of freedom versus power in spatial construction in Faulkner's thought, it is reasonable to read Ed's living situation as having a freedom that the narrator does not possess.

Faulkner's longer architectural dialogue, however, proposes a more complex engagement with structures. Simultaneous states of protection and freedom are unattainable for Faulkner's characters, making Ed's self-construction a partial and ultimately vulnerable form of civilization in Faulkner's broader view. "Mirrors" sets a precedent for Faulkner's thinking on architectures of freedom and power; at the same time, it also exemplifies Faulkner's double-mindedness about the virtues and limitations of southern life. Faulkner gets the reader to admire Ed's ability to draw himself a room on the street wherever he is, giving him complete mobility and freedom; however, he has no protection or privacy.

Compare Faulkner's glorification of Ed's building a tentative space of his own with his much later essay "On Privacy," in which he argues for structural privacy as essential to American idealism. The Faulkner of this essay is a different man from the carefree and unknown bohemian of the Vieux Carré. By 1955, Faulkner has built his legacy as a literary giant and as a southerner with family, home, and land. An outpouring public response to Faulkner's essays and letters on integration in the South augmented the author's feelings, no doubt, of surveillance, permeability, and compression. Faulkner responds to a dwindling sense of his own privacy as an artist:

This was the American Dream: a sanctuary on the earth for individual man: a condition in which he could be free not only of the old established closed-corporation hierarchies of arbitrary power which had oppressed him as a mass, but free of that mass into which the hierarchies of church and state had compressed and held him individually thralled and individually impotent.

(62)

Now a fixture of southern community by his ownership of Rowan Oak, Faulkner grounds his essay in commentary on American architecture:

The American sky which was once the topless empyrean of freedom, the American air which was once the living breath of liberty, are now become one vast down-crowding pressure to abolish them both, by destroying man's individuality as a man by (in that turn) destroying the last vestige of privacy without which man cannot be an individual. Our very architecture itself has warned us. Time was when you could see neither from inside nor from outside through the walls of our houses. [End Page 65] Time is when you can see from inside out though still not from outside in through the walls. Time will be when you can do both. Then privacy will indeed be gone; he who is individual enough to want it even to change his shirt or bathe in, will be cursed by one universal American voice as subversive to the American way of life and the American flag.

(73)

As with many of his essays, Faulkner approaches his subject with passion, certainty, and clarity; however, his writing on privacy and freedom as simultaneously attainable American ideals presents a contradiction and conflict which is not acknowledged or resolved by the end of the essay. Does Faulkner want the open sky of future space or the "opaque" (73) walls of past architecture? The essay itself encompasses the dilemma of the American "individual" seeking the opaque walls of the sanctuary without realizing that the sanctuary is, in fact, a return to the "old established closed-corporation hierarchies" which Americans originally reacted against.

It is arguable that Faulkner's own flâneuristic view of New Orleans in 1925, intensified by his immersion in the world of art and architecture, allows him to comment on property and privacy differently than he would later in life. The narrator as a projected version of himself still sees the events on the street from a position of relative privilege, yet we know that Faulkner's life while writing the sketches was one of his most itinerant and least private periods compared with his later living situations. "On Privacy" is no doubt written by an older and famous Faulkner, for whom privacy is at the heart of American individualism. By contrast, New Orleans Sketches shows a vagrant and less established Faulkner without private property or public persona. Even before Faulkner acquires a reason to value privacy, his work dramatizes the ability to create a public space in which one is visible but still inviolable. In the context of Faulkner's larger work, "Mirrors" is a rare depiction of the individual's making space and property using the body and the privilege of those with the ability to maintain those boundaries.

A double-mindedness about American ideals, southern life, and architecture pervades "Mirrors." Faulkner contrasts the ideals of security and freedom in the figures of the more powerful onlooking narrator in his sanctuary of baronial splendor and the vagrant who builds his home [End Page 66] with his body in the street.⁷ The narrator looks on with admiration and some envy while Ed has mobility but not inviolability from state power. Spatially, the open American sky is akin to the house of the future in which, Faulkner suggests, the resident's view of the outside is equal to the outsider's view inside. Faulkner does not recognize that these two models are equally visible and without privacy, though the space of the protected narrator is imagined as more ideal.

"On Privacy" and "Mirrors" express not only a spatial anxiety about individual self-realization but also an anxiety related to a history of aesthetics in Faulkner's New Orleans environment. Faulkner's use of line and motion between the two characters is yet another doubling. Architectural aesthetics and lines dominate and determine the narrator's experience whereas lines drawn by the body are Ed's instruments for building and architectural aesthetic. Ed builds a home and a new form of privacy with his body while using the materials of public space.

Motion and Line

Motion and line are definitive components in Faulkner's representations of the body as it relates to space and building. In his famous interview with Jean Stein, Faulkner remarks that "Life is motion. . . . The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that 100 years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life" ("Art of Fiction" 49–50). In his 1968 publication Faulkner: Myth and Motion, Richard P. Adams frames motion in Faulkner's texts as a necessary compliance with the physical properties of bodily experience:

Because motion cannot be directly described, it must be demonstrated indirectly by the static 'artificial means' the artist has to work with. If we conceive of motion as a stream (an image often used by Faulkner) we find that its power cannot be felt by someone moving with it, or in it, as living people normally do. If, however, some object, or better if some person, can be made to stand still against its flow, the result will be a dramatic and possibly disastrous manifestation of its energy.

(5) [End Page 67]

Adams points out the tension between flowing and static energy and its resulting violence as a "by-product of the speed and the motion" of modern life (6). He also describes Faulkner's continuous technique of counterpoint between motion and stasis (8), finding examples of the "frozen moment" and "stopped motion" in Faulkner's work (12). In "Mirrors," Faulkner's dialectic shifts between the narrator's still, private space of observation and the vagrant's moving body. At the same time, Faulkner develops an important aspect of Vorticist thought that life in motion can only be known by the still and distant observer.

In "Mirrors," Faulkner shows the vagabond in distinct contrast to the flowing lines of the iron railing. At the same time, Ed himself configures a dialectic between curving and geometric lines. Ed's arching motion cuts through a presumed public and personal space: "he swung himself across my path with apelike agility" (15). Ed draws angular lines on the pavement with his body to mimic the geometry of the house, fixing himself within the planes created by his points.

The line of the traced rectangle created by the arc of his crutch behaves as an instrument and a mechanical extension of Ed's body. Lines co-exist simultaneously as movements around Ed's still body: "he darted and spun on his crutch like a water beetle about a rock. His voice rose and fell, his crutch-end, arcing in the street lamp, described a rectangle upon the pavement and within this rectangle he became motionless with one movement, like a bird alighting" (16). Again, Faulkner suggests the machinery of Ed's crutch as an extension of his body. The propeller-like circular motion complements the angular form of the rectangle: "He stood miraculously on his single leg and his crutch spun about his head like a propeller blade" (17). The arc of the crutch and swinging of the body is completed by a sweeping of the straight crutch being brought back into the body: "He swept the crutch back to his armpit, and struck an attitude" (17).

Faulkner's bodily architecture does not require tools or materials. Furthermore, his bodies in dialogue with buildings and each other contribute to a theory of modernist choreography, in which the body is conversing not only with the aesthetics of the past but also articulating the movements of work. Faulkner's construction of Ed as a former railroad worker is cohesive with the author's writing of the character's movements. [End Page 68]

The narrator's conventional paths of motion through public space and his protected stillness within the semi-private space of his balcony integrate into the romantic flow of New Orleans life. In some ways his movements are juxtaposed with modernity. Adams is primarily concerned with what he calls "destiny" and the "moral implications" of Faulkner's moving world (Myth 4, 12). He especially argues that characters unable to keep in rhythm or who demonstrate a type of arrhythmia with the movements of life provide the best material for Faulkner's writing (Myth 13). Adams further explains how Faulkner's transference of artistic line and movement into his writing accords with Henri Bergson's sense of dynamic movement:

Faulkner, as Bergson recommends, gathers wildly incompatible images and flings them at us in a stunning and apparently random profusion. Perhaps we are put in the right position—at least we are driven out of most of the wrong positions—to generate an intuition of dynamic movement.

("Apprenticeship" 41)

Faulkner's narrator, who embodies bourgeois culture, is the static observer in dynamic tension with Ed's dislocated building of place with his body and public movement. Faulkner's architectural dialogue shows static life to be the least aligned with the rhythms of life since the narrator's spatial orientation and stillness are associated with old and romanticized ideals. Ed's movements—developed by modern work culture, the age of automation, and specifically the materials and movements of railroad work—have altered the motion of modern life. In this case, Adams' theory of arrhythmia is significant in an architectural dialogue in which Faulkner asserts movements that are truly avant-garde.

The Romantic and imperial neo-Baroque elements of Faulkner's Vieux Carré railings behave as styles adjacent to the late nineteenthcentury leanings of Faulkner's early developing tastes. His writings while in Europe show a reluctance to embrace the "very very modernist" Vorticists while his encounters with the gothic and Baroque suggest a subject that is both imposing and ridiculous. He writes in a letter that the gargoyles of Notre Dame were "all staring down in a jeering sardonic mirth" (Letters 12). While he clearly admires the continental moderns of his time like Cézanne, Faulkner's tastes as a sketch artist are more romantic. They reflect a subtle balance between simplicity and flourish so valued by artists of Art Nouveau, the Belle Époque, and [End Page 69] French Symbolism. We can speculate how Faulkner may have attended to the Metro signs of Paris as he took the subway to Père Lachaise Cemetery in 1925. The drifting protagonist of "Mirrors" seems similarly situated. A follower of Beardsley and Mucha, he must navigate and negotiate between an ornamented Napoleonic past—of which the material signs are everywhere—and the straight fast lines of a Marinetti future. Neither of these styles are entirely comfortable for the narrator.

Echoing Linda Wagner-Martin's closing remarks in "Go Down, Moses: Faulkner's Interrogation of the American Dream," I suggest that "Mirrors" expresses a confession of America and the South as civilizations in decline. Wagner-Martin writes that we should read Faulkner's later novel as highly biographical and as a meditation emerging from the author's real ambivalence and impotence as an American southerner, as well as his admiration for black being. She suggests that Rider is the hero of the entire work and that Faulkner

watches the American Dream float by, and realizes what a sham it is. In his disillusion, he can only grieve for all the life that stands around him—and the people he sees that he admires most are black. No matter how whites want to explain and socialize their behavior, they do not have the power, or the understanding, to play that authoritative role.

(149)

"Mirrors" may indicate Faulkner's expression of disillusion at the very beginning of his writing. Ed signifies as an exception and figure of hope beyond the confines of southern life. The narrator behaves as a version of Faulkner himself, witnessing and experiencing the incongruity of southern American life, though in the form of an ongoing aesthetic and architectural dialogue.

Mendelssohn in Iron

Faulkner uses two representative and epochal aesthetics in architectural dialogue: imperial and modern. His explicit reference to Vorticist aesthetics is aligned with Ed and his ability to dynamically build with his body. New building contrasts with a specifically imperial history of the New Orleans railings, which are spatially associated with the narrator. "Mirrors" presents New Orleans as an imperial setting in the beginning of the sketch with references to the Egyptian and Roman empires, as well as to Spartacus as a leader of enslaved people. Faulkner concretizes the imperial reference with an attention to New Orleans [End Page 70] space and buildings and manifests the dynamic in a seemingly masterslave interaction between Ed and the police officer. At the same time, Faulkner summons a whole host of modern forms of building and aesthetics including his reference to Vorticism, industrial labor, and mechanization.

Vorticism, while not an architecture, is a modernist movement based on an ongoing tension between stillness and movement. It includes angular and industrial forms. In the context of "Mirrors," the Vorticist essential rejection of the sentimental or romantic is a contrasting aesthetic and set of values to the imperial and mythic. Vorticism represents an impending modernism which, for Faulkner, challenges the mythic. It is suggested that Ed himself is associated with the modern and the machine age, given his former work on the railroad and the use of his crutch to trace out and imagine a new type of building. Ed transcends the history of the place, making public space without materials and without property.

Faulkner writes in his foreword to Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, "Do you know our quarter, with its narrow streets old wrought-iron balconies and its southern European atmosphere?" In "Mirrors," the author features grand New Orleans architecture, recognizing its heritage in European art and empire as well as in forms that have become central to a larger southern culture. Faulkner builds New Orleans in the text as a place of mythic importance with references to stories of the New Testament and King Arthur. Ed, clearly portrayed as a vagabond, is at first romanticized with his "untrammeled spirit" as one more figure among Faulkner's mythic saviors and seekers.

Empire is extended to the imaging and building of New Orleans: "Even those who carved those strange flat-handed creatures on the Temple of Rameses must have dreamed New Orleans by moonlight" (16). Arguably, the status of Faulkner's later representations of both mythic and imperial architectures in his fiction are featured players in his civilization in decline. Faulkner critically explores the plantation house in his later fiction, for example, as one of many architectural forms materially and ideologically established on the values and attitudes of European imperialism. In "Mirrors," the railings of New Orleans are the most emblematic of an old aristocracy.

While much of Faulkner's fiction alludes to the mythic aspects of the southern international style influenced by Greco-Roman architecture, [End Page 71] the iron railings of "Mirrors" highlight the ornamented aesthetics of the centuries following European Baroque movements. Faulkner's engagement with nineteenth-century ornamentation in this work signifies a conservative politic for the preservation of southern life and an increased desire to return to antebellum values. It is arguable that Faulkner's major works are most concerned architecturally, and therefore socially, with nineteenth-century Romantic and Victorian design.

The ornamentation of architectural style before the twentieth century, acutely explored by modern architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, becomes in Faulkner's fiction an emblem of European civilization and hierarchy. Thomas Sutpen's newly built house is notably lacking in windows, doors, and ornamental décor, which he associates with women and the feminine. Sutpen's gradual acquisition of ornament parallels his concession to adopt the European-derived practices given to marriage, family, and continuing legacy. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century design motifs are treated increasingly as subjects with which to converse and struggle as they engage questions of a civilization built on decaying power.

"Mirrors" narrates the main action of the sketch from the perspective and position of the narrator: "Later, from a railed balcony—Mendelssohn impervious in iron—I saw him for the last time" (16). Faulkner's reference to the railings is vital to a conversation between the architecture of the city and Ed's own mode of building. I suggest three aspects relevant to an interpretation of railings in the text: the material and construction history of the railings; the global context of imperial materiality; and Faulkner's attention to the aesthetics of the body corresponding with railing design.

The first aspect is the materiality of New Orleans's iron railings in relation to the city's complex history of work, class, and social disparity. In alignment with the small percentage of Spanish colonial design buildings in New Orleans, railings throughout the city are wrought iron and designed during the Spanish period. Geographies of New Orleans, an in-depth statistical study of New Orleans architectures and their histories published after Hurricane Katrina by The Tulane School of Architecture's Richard Campanella, substantiates a correspondence between buildings with wrought-iron balconies in the French Quarter and Spanish Colonial design. The majority of railings are cast iron, which was produced quickly and cheaply by the Leeds Iron Foundry [End Page 72] beginning in 1825. The minority of railings are made of wrought iron. Eighteen of the twenty-five buildings made with wrought iron are of Spanish Colonial design. By 1850, most wooden and wrought iron railings had been replaced by cast iron railings and the city was filled with the iron lace balconies and galleries found throughout the French Quarter today (137).

Several aspects of Campanella's study stand out in terms of Faulkner's balcony on Chartres Street. Campanella speculates as to why the "[m]ulti-story cast iron galleries, supported with columns and covering the entire banquette" became so prominent and privileged over the former balconies by the late nineteenth century. He writes that "[u]nlike balconies, which were designed for little more than a perch and breath of fresh air, these new galleries were spacious, shaded platforms halfway between public and private space, the perfect re-articulation of a porch or front yard in an urban environment too congested for either" (136). Associating these galleries with a French Creole design, he speculates on the reason for this development:

One wonders if the circa-1850 popularity of iron-lace galleries may be linked to the cultural predilection for semi-private outdoor space among eighteenth-century New Orleanians, which had been forced into the patio (literally) by Spanish building codes and urban densification, only to return years later when technology (iron casting) offered a new and affordable way.

(136)

The railing history suggested by Campanella is important for understanding the contrasting socialities of the narrator's semi-privacy and the outcast's sheer publicity shown by Faulkner as somehow emblematic of life in 1920s New Orleans.

The semi-private function of New Orleans railings is deeply entwined with the lifestyle of Faulkner's foppish flâneur. In the narrator's self-professed pride of appearance, store-bought tweeds, and apartment, Faulkner sketches a man of some means living a life of aesthetic appreciation. The railings are a related motif to the narrator's bourgeois ability to observe public life while remaining visibly peripheral. The narrator's seated position on the semi-private balcony displays a social mobility, structural stability, and semi-visibility that contrasts sharply with Ed's social implacement, perpetual instability, and complete bodily vulnerability. The balcony in "Mirrors" acquires greater value in Faulkner's body of work retroactively through the lens of his ideal matrix of invisibility and surveillance described in "On Privacy." In [End Page 73] "Mirrors," the narrator rests and disappears among the monumental architectures of a romantic New Orleans and the ideal of American privacy in which the resident has the visible advantage over the outsider, while Ed creates a new mode of spatial agency out of a totalized public visibility.

The design and execution of the railings indicate a classed and racial power dynamic. In his mapped study of iron ornateness among architectures of the French Quarter, Campanella cites the intersection of Chartres/Dumaine Street along with the Pontalba Apartments as the most decadent examples of iron-lace balcony work (138). Much iron work in New Orleans was finished by enslaved West Africans, especially on the Pontalba Apartments. Historian and poet Marcus Christian notes that most of the new cast iron structures were completed by white workers who would work for a low wage (55–56). The history of industrial work is important given that Ed's signifying feature in "Mirrors" is his disability as a former railroad worker. Hagood suggests, "Although evidently a white man, this disabled character emerges in the vein of black trickster" through Faulkner's racialized references to Ed as an ape or a water beetle (Writer of Disability 58).

The second point of significance in Faulkner's New Orleans railings is its background in global architectures of empire built by the working class. Faulkner signifies the ornateness of the railing by referring to Mendelssohn, known for his intricate, dreamy, and idyllic compositions. In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche understands the work of Mendelssohn as the "music of romanticization." He distinguishes Mendelssohn from other composers by virtue of his being a "halcyon master whose lighter, purer, more cheerful soul made him quickly celebrated and just as quickly forgotten" (138). Queen Victoria was a fan of Mendelssohn and had his wedding march played at her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840, which popularized the composition for weddings thereafter. In her diary, the queen calls Mendelssohn a "wonderful genius" (Mercer-Taylor 200). Victoria also requested that a statue of the composer be a part of the rebuilt Crystal Palace in London in 1854.

Mendelssohn became a cherished symbol of Victorian idealism in his time and over the following decades, which was increasingly a matter of tension for the modernists. In his review, George Bernard [End Page 74] Shaw characterizes the composer's "kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio mongering" (Shaw 565). Faulkner's reference to Mendelssohn is a related criticism of Victorian values. The author's technique of binding a character to a Victorian idyllic taste as a means of critique is a method he would repeat and perfect in Light in August in the character Gail Hightower, whose worship of Tennyson emblematizes his penchant for aloofness, idealism, and attempt to self-isolate from human struggle. In "Mirrors," Mendelssohn is emblematic of the narrator's social outlook and of a decaying, irrelevant, and literally lofty perspective.

Faulkner's weaving of the tactile and visual with Mendelssohnian sound creates an audiovisual rhythm for the reader. After seeing the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, Faulkner writes with a synesthetic sense of architecture, textile, and sound, "This Cathedral! Can you imagine stone lace? Or frozen music?" (Letters 9). Julie Beth Napolin develops the circumambulatory and reprisal aspects of sound in Faulkner's fiction. Air takes on a material presence in Absalom, Absalom!, much as music takes physical form in railings. Just as the "original ripple-space" of water plays out unseen rhythms of air (Napolin 228), so the railing circulates a sound, narrative, and feeling that repeatedly weaves itself through the past and into the present.

In the railing, Faulkner reconciles architectural movement with material and aesthetic attitude. It is fitting that the material and the composer both signify the aesthetics of nineteenth-century Europe. In his Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project], Walter Benjamin collects textual remnants of nineteenth-century Parisian materiality with the goal of elaborating on a twentieth-century moment. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London at the Crystal Palace occupies a large portion of Benjamin's konvolut on exhibitions. In common with other architectures of legacy and privacy so valued by the nineteenth-century citydweller as described by Benjamin, the Crystal Palace was built with wood, iron, and glass. Glass, steel, and iron were the preferred construction materials in Paris and London. Iron and Mendelssohn are bound together in the history and symbolism of the Crystal Palace. Queen Victoria's belief that the palace was the most fitting place for the composer's statue reflects Mendelssohn's public image in association with the ideals of a monumental, sprawling, and ornate age. [End Page 75]

Benjamin gathers texts relating iron to empire as well as to the worker in his konvolut on "Iron Construction." He gleans Dolf Sternberger's comment from Panorama of the Nineteenth Century: "'iron' is used . . . whenever . . . power and necessity are supposed to be manifest. Iron are the laws of nature, and iron is the 'stride of the worker battalion'; the . . . union of the German empire is supposedly made of iron, and so is . . . the chancellor himself" (170). Benjamin shows how the transition from wood to iron as a building material was essential to a new empire:

Even Fontaine, one of the originators of the Empire style, is converted in later years to the new material. . . . he replaced the wooden flooring of the Galerie des Batailles in Versailles with an iron assembly. . . . they are a point of departure for new architectural problems: train stations, and the like.

(153)

It is significant in Faulkner's reference to Ed's work that American railroads were made of both iron and steel during the nineteenth century, with a transition to mostly steel rails by the 1870s (Misa xx–xxi). Iron, then, in Faulkner's text acquires a double signification to both the building of empire and the labor of the former railroad worker. Ed's identity takes on greater meaning with the knowledge that Faulkner's father was treasurer for the Chicago Gulf and Railroad Company.

Faulkner's poetic of iron in "Mirrors" establishes a relationship between line, movement, and building. The iron lines that evoke Mendelssohn are fluid, interconnected, and intricate. The reader may readily associate these qualities with the fluid movements of the flâneuristic narrator, weaving promiscuously through public structures while maintaining an iron-clad and impervious sense of private space. Mendelssohnian movement converses with Ed's more dynamic, angular, and also fluid movements. Mendelssohnian iron, in its concreteness and independence from the body, behaves as a gate which protects both the Old South and a Victorian ideal. The railing guarding the narrator contrasts with the modern and specifically Vorticist elements of building with the body.

Vorticism and Building with the Body

Faulkner specifically writes in "Mirrors" that the New Orleans "planes of light and shadow were despair for the Vorticist Schools" (16). [End Page 76] In "The Impact of the Arts on Faulkner's Writing," Lothar Hönnighausen provides one of the most thorough reviews of the influence of artistic style and form in Faulkner's work. He points out that Vorticism in Faulkner, like futurism, is mostly only referred to while cubism, post-impressionism, and Keats's specific brand of neo-classicism are ongoing and recurring themes: "While he mentions futurism and vorticism, his focus remained on art nouveau and, simultaneously and subsequently, on cubism" (559). The question is why Faulkner would choose to refer to a relatively more obscure movement, especially one so limited in its lifespan during a few years of the 1910s.

Though the influence of Vorticism reached much of continental Europe and beyond, it was localized in London as a reaction to what its artists perceived as the dogmatism and political confinement of movements like futurism. I suggest that Faulkner's reference to Vorticists in "Mirrors" is the most fitting for the author's commentary on tradition, movement, and aesthetic dialogue. The character and performativity of Ed in many ways takes on the attitude of Vorticists as he is undeniably modern, individualistic, and eristic. His dialogical nature, angular movements, and satirizing of contemporaneous archetypes are all qualities explored and fictionalized by the movement's founders, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound.

Lewis and Pound are especially relevant to Faulkner's reference to Vorticism given their aesthetic influence on Faulkner's own writing. They were the most prominent creators of the Vorticist movement and also the most influential literary figures of the aesthetic. Lewis largely directed the Vorticist publication Blast: The Review of the Great English Vortex in 1914, with an exhibition following in 1915. After he wrote New Orleans Sketches, Faulkner would travel to Europe with Spratling and meet Pound in Paris, after which he would remark of Pound that he "admired him tremendously" (Sherwood Anderson 15). The impact of Faulkner on Lewis is explicit in Lewis's 1934 book, Men without Art. Entitled "The Moralist with the Corn-cob," Lewis's chapter is leveled at Faulkner's artistic skill in Sanctuary. In the end, he evaluates Faulkner as a novelist of preceding centuries rather than modern and also a satirist rather than an artist (Men 43, 64). Given the Vorticist value of satire as an ultimate form of art and distinction, Lewis's commentary on Faulkner is deferential in its critique. [End Page 77]

Faulkner's antagonistic tone about Vorticists in "Mirrors" reflects a widely held perception of modern artists as cold and sterile in taste. Faulkner refers to the modernist desire to destroy the past, and an aversion to both the old world and "beauty" in general. This is not entirely unfounded, of course. The reader may think of Le Corbusier's famous dictum that one should reject all styles. Faulkner could not have known while writing Sketches that his critical reference to Vorticists anticipated a future critic of his own work in Lewis.

It is also noteworthy that with the exception of Michael Millgate's reference to Lewis's critique of Faulkner in The Achievement of William Faulkner, the connection between Faulkner and Lewis has been largely unremarked upon in critical writing. While Faulkner's comment on Vorticism may seem critical of the movement, I want to suggest that Faulkner asserts Vorticist principles of line and movement as a legitimate challenge to a city which still embodies a nineteenth-century Mendelssohnian attitude and power dynamic. Though the reference to nominal Vorticism is brief, the Vorticist aesthetic is on display as Ed builds with his body.

We should first review some defining aspects of Vorticist aesthetics and values pertaining to Faulkner's concern with the movement of lines. Vorticism has been associated with other hyper-masculine and militant contemporaneous movements, perhaps because of the forcefulness of its rhetoric; however, Lewis carefully defines the movement in his original manifesto as an emphatic rejection of both cubism and futurism. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein's essay collection recontextualizes the movement more broadly as happening beyond British masculine fascist attitudes during the interwar period. They write that the "various Vorticisms that came together under its name—should be recognized more widely as the movement of self-proclaimed action and reaction, sophistication and primal force, with which it blasted onto the London scene before World War I" (8).

One ideal common to Vorticists, Cubists, and Futurists is a collective rejection of Victorian and nineteenth-century European ideals. In the manifesto, Lewis writes "Blast years 1837 to 1900[.] Curse abysmal inexcusable middle-class (also Aristocracy and Proletariat)" (Blast 18). The clarity of the movement's opposition to the nineteenth century makes Faulkner's pitting of Mendelssohnian New Orleans Neo-classicism against Vorticist aesthetics all the more public and relevant as a [End Page 78] discourse of Faulkner's time. As was mentioned, Vorticists responded to their contemporary modernists with a similar dismissiveness.

In his depiction of Lewis and Pound's formation of literary Vorticism, Reed Way Dasenbrock points out that when Vorticists compared themselves to both Cubists and Futurists, they describe Futurists as being associated with the past, as Futurists did in reference to Cubists (31). Furthermore, Lewis calls Picasso "sentimental and inactive" (32). Faulkner aestheticizes the modernist struggle for novelty, a rejection of history and civilization, as well as a desire to create new relationships between society and the individual.

Several aspects of Vorticism are characteristic of Ed's positionality in "Mirrors." One is the dynamic between group power and the assertion of individual freedom, which becomes evident when a police officer challenges Ed's right to stand in the street. In his essay "Ezra Pound, Man Ray, and Vorticism in America," Allan Antliff expounds on the shared culture of individualism and anarchy between Max Stirner and Vorticists. Stirner's philosophy of egoism significantly influenced London activist and writer Dora Marsden, who founded the modernist periodical The Egoist, the publication in which Pound and Lewis expressed their ideas on individualism before publishing the Vorticist manifesto (142–43). Antliff emphasizes Stirner's "self-consciousness against the State" as well as the empowerment of self when faced with the social group (142). The reader of Faulkner finds in "Mirrors" and in "On Privacy" not only the tension between society and the individual but especially a desire to thwart or elude those mechanisms which will never protect the individual.

Secondly, the spatial-constructive concept of the vortex expresses an attitude of motion resonant with Faulkner's philosophy of movement and ontology as it would be fully realized in his later work. Arguably the form of the vortex with its stillness and movement is one of many modernist theories of aesthetic motion related to chaos and order which collectively influenced and contributed to Faulkner's early thought. Dasenbrock writes that the literary Vorticist concept of movement is "like the vortex from which it takes its name, which is in constant motion but has a stable form and a still center. The style of Vorticist art is . . . dynamic formism, a reconciliation of form and flux based on the perception at the still point of the vortex" (36). [End Page 79]

Furthermore, Dasenbrock emphasizes the importance of detachment, suspension, and keen observation of the Vorticist aesthetic:

the Vorticist desires to adopt a balanced attitude towards the modern world, not to identify with its flux and chaos but to observe and analyze it from a position of detachment. This detachment is well represented by the image of the vortex: the Vorticist occupies a still center and looks out at the flux surrounding him. The artist holds on to the still point of the modern world and looks out with detachment at that world.

(47–48)

Vorticists articulate tensions between stillness and motion within other contemporaneous movements struggling with questions of representation and participation, especially regarding social norms, warfare, and art in the context of European-derived forms of civilization. The reader may be reminded of the well-known line of Willian Butler Yeats's 1919 poem "The Second Coming" that "the centre cannot hold." Faulkner, in contrast to the inability to suspend oneself from motion and chaos, assumes the burden and benefits of creating a center that must hold for the sake of both representation and realization.

Not only the narrator of "Mirrors" refrains from action; Ed also maintains a still center with his body as he draws the lines of his dwelling. Faulkner would state in 1956 that the artist's goal was to "arrest motion which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life." Faulkner had already written the bulk of his life's work and his most acclaimed novels by the time he made this statement. The analytical and aloof neutrality of the vortex is a perspective that is in some ways held by Faulkner the writer and then transferred to the narrator in this sketch. It is reasonable to view Faulkner's narrator, observing from up high, as a mouthpiece and metaphor for Faulkner's own position as describer and narrator.

The vortex, representing the motion of life, as well as the dynamism of fluid and geometric form are all primary aspects of Faulkner's own attitude as well as his narrator and Ed himself. While the narrator is safely ensconced in his own stillness on the balcony, Ed creates a vortex in which his body is centered so that he can pivot and extend lines of motion:

About the symbolical stolidity of a cop he darted and spun on his crutch like a water beetle about a rock. His voice rose and fell, his crutch-end, arcing in the street lamp, [End Page 80] described a rectangle upon the pavement and within this rectangle he became motionless with one movement, like a bird alighting.

(16)

Ed embodies and constructs the Vorticist balance of stillness achieved by lines of movement.

Faulkner's titling of his sketch as "Mirrors" implies the two characters as doubles of one another. The narrator's imperviousness behind iron mirrors Ed's imprisonment. Faulkner creates a doubling of persona in the imprisoned impartial narrator watching the improvising vagabond. The Vorticist attitude is only completed by the narrator's stillness and Ed's movement in combination and in conversation. The tension between the narrator on the balcony and Ed's angular, emphatic satirization culminates in a vortex. Ed makes his body the center of open public space while drawing lines away with his arms, leg, and crutch. In this scene Ed both mimics and mocks the act of building a house with a keen sense of irony that after he lost his leg on the railroad in an effort to build America, he had less right to "his own room": "Arrest me in my own room! Arrest me! Where's laws and justice? . . . Ain't every laborer got his own home, and ain't this mine?" (17). Within the tension mirrored between Ed and the narrator, Ed's satirizing of private life and the protection of private space is a closing statement without an opportunity for reply. His ability to dwell nomadically beyond the confines of civilizing architecture in many ways rebukes and refuses the narrator's relative security and associated history of power. Ed's stance reads as a dramatic and modern final rebuff to the initial proposition of Mendelssohnian grandeur.

Thirdly, the Vorticist urban landscapes of industrialization and the aesthetics of a mechanical age is part of Ed's persona as a former rail worker. While the Vorticists set out to distinguish themselves from what they perceived as the Futurist sentimentality over machinery, industry and mechanization were central to their definition of modern life. They call machinery the "greatest Earth-medium" (Lewis, Blast 39). As Dasenbrock suggests, one distinguishing characteristic between Vorticism and Futurism is an attention to the effects and manifestations of machinery, in war and in civilian life, and not in an honorific sense as with Futurists. The dynamism of form emerges from the fact that "both artist and beholder stand off and engage in detached observation. Lewis is not judging these figures as much as reflecting upon what it [End Page 81] means to be modern, to live in a mechanized environment, and to be controlled by that mechanization" (46).

While Dasenbrock calls the Vorticist representation of machinery in the human body "dehumanized," he also calls it an "analytical" approach which works against the "modernolatry of Futurism" (47). This adoption of an observational and analytical dialectic instead of a positive or negative one is aligned with Faulkner's own stance in this sketch. Furthermore, the emphasis on technology is essential to Faulkner's representation of a man whose livelihood has been permanently altered by industrial and mechanized life.

The waning relevance of the Romantics as part of urban American life is all the more acute when we consider Faulkner's juxtaposition between the nineteenth-century iron railings and what industrialism looked like elsewhere as captured by the Vorticists. The "dream of New Orleans" is an illusion compared with the everyday realities of rail workers. The lines and forms drawn by Ed resemble the Vorticist aesthetic, in dynamic form, in the tension between fluidity and angularity, and also as a transference between the moving lines of machinery to the human body. Faulkner's representation of the human body in Ed's figure is mechanical form. Dasenbrock insists that the connection between Vorticism and machinery is the body's inherently mechanistic qualities, exemplified in the working bodies in Lewis's sketches and in Jacob Epstein's iconic sculpture Rock Drill (38).

Lewis's own emphasis on the mechanical body at work brings into focus Faulkner's analogy between body and machine. Faulkner illustrates how the movements of work outlive the work itself. Well after his life on the railroad and the events causing his loss of limb, Ed is described according to mechanical and locomotive movements which are the rehearsed involuntary movements of physical labor. The geometry of the invisible room Ed draws for himself illustrates the incongruity between the body of modern industrial life and the romanticism of old New Orleans.⁸ [End Page 82]

Fourthly, Ed's satirization of American spatial values deeply aligns with the intentions of Vorticism. This satire includes humor, mockery of tragedy, and self-mockery. In Blast, Lewis writes, "We set humour at humour's throat. . . . We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hands on it's [sic] belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb" (31). Fredric Jameson importantly highlights in his meta-dynamic essay the fact that Vorticism is a profoundly self-satirizing art, encompassing the tension and dynamic of two forms which in other movements accommodate or subsume one another. He emphasizes Vorticism as a movement intent on conversing with tension. Jameson points to Lewis's aesthetics specifically: "Lewis understood, or his painterly unconscious understood, that the solution is not to be found by assimilating the one to the other, by allowing either force to triumph. Neither curves nor angles, but rather both: and not in combination but in violent antagonism" (26).

Jameson characterizes the style of violence captured by Vorticist painters as an act which thwarts simplicity, certainly, but also works with complexity and sympathy against an aesthetic of binarism or dualism. There is no pure battle of the "zigzag versus the human body. . . . neither side exists in a pure state, altogether free from the infection (or gravitational pull) of the other. The zigzag, for example, is the square or rectangular pulled out of shape by the circular" (28). The Vorticist plunge into the heart of tension as well as its aspect of self-mockery is essential to Faulkner's endeavor in this early work.

Faulkner presents the narrator as a thinly veiled version of himself. This especially tension-filled, less resolute scene given by Faulkner goes hand in hand with the ability to see his own literary personification as a mockery. Jameson points out the same relationship in Lewis's work between the naïve interwar figure and the artist's transparent inability to assemble the meaning of the chaos around him. In Lewis's work, we have the Tyro, described as a "beginner or novice," but more specific to Lewis's depiction, the "postwar youth or even youth-cult generation, naïve and pretentious fops with a penchant for culture" (Jameson 20). Similar to Faulkner's New Orleans flâneur who is as naïve, observant, [End Page 83] and open as himself, Lewis also uses the young post-war figure "to paint himself" (Jameson 20). In Lewis's art, Jameson connects this self-satirization to Lewis's expressions of "confused puzzlement, a bewildered suspension, even a kind of innocence, as if this were the momentary vantage point through which the painter attempted to grasp the Manichean chaos all around him" (Jameson 29). We see Faulkner's New Orleans flâneur at the end of the scene not as a specifically satirized or confused figure, but rather as a sieve through which the reader must sort out the incongruities of the time and place.

Finally, the key philosophical beliefs and attitudes written by Lewis in the Vorticist manifesto would indicate Faulkner's homeless character as an expression of similarly held values. All of the previously discussed aspects of Ed's performance and ontology necessarily point to the values of individualism and a rejection of romanticization as core criteria of the Vorticist movement. As Lewis writes, Vorticism rejects the romanticization of the past: "We stand for the Reality of the Present—not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past" (Blast [7]). The rejection of nostalgia connects with a rejection of the view that the working class are objects of romanticism. Lewis's use of quotation marks indicates a subtle commentary against movements motivated by Marxist sentiment: "The 'Poor' are detestable animals! They are only picturesque and amusing for the sentimentalist or the romantic!" ([8]). Furthermore, Lewis insists on the Vorticist promotion and preservation of the individual: "Blast presents an art of Individuals" ([8]). In a similar attitude, Faulkner not only humanizes Ed, but also gives him distinction. At least in this sketch Ed is not a contented vagabond, but rather a strong and formidable figure of public life, though it is arguable that the narrator romanticizes Ed as a princely or sanctified figure. Faulkner creates an architectural dynamic between the two which heroizes present modes of modern space-making and dwelling over a romanticized and mythic New Orleans.

The Vorticist spirit informs the lines and movement of Faulkner's bodies and buildings. Through new architectures, Faulkner challenges the historical constructions and forms that hold us to and within the past. It is a material and ontological realization made possible only in dialogue between bodies and buildings. Faulkner speaks through architecture and adds to the dialogue of architectures themselves by showing [End Page 84] the reader how to build with our bodies beyond the confines of constructed space or documented architectural history. [End Page 85]