Enemy of the Stars
Enemy of the Stars was published in the magazine Blast, which first appeared in June of 1914. The play has also been re-published in the Anthology Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays (1979) and Wyndham Lewis: AN Anthology of his Prose (1969). The first time the play was ever published in book form, was in 1932 by Desmond Harmsworth of London. Enemy of the Stars has never been performed, and is considered to be an "unperformable play".
The theme of Enemy of the Stars coincides with Vorticist ideology. In Enemy of the Stars, the protagonist Arghol’s death is realized "each time the instinct to merge overwhelms the instinct to give form, each time habit overtakes consciousness, each time empathy supplants intellect in the human psyche" (Kush 84). Every time that Arghol strikes back against the vicious Hanp, a character who is much closer than Arghol to being assimilated into the vicious competitiveness of the environment, he loses his stability and gravitates towards Hanp and less favorable areas of the vortex. Arghol eventually tries to strain from "humanity in an attempt to assert a godlike sovereign identity, a self" (Foshay 40). Arghol’s task is a difficult one however, for self "is the ancient race, the rest are new. Self is the race that lost" (Lewis Enemy of the Stars 66). Ultimately Arghol never gets the chance to separate himself from the environment, as he is killed by Hanp. Through the killing of Arghol deed, Hanp becomes a mere instinct of nature" (Kush 84).
Dramatic Nature-Involving the Outsider
Enemy of the Stars (1914) is written for the most part in prose. The words "Arghol" and "Hanp" are not followed by colons, and they are not separated from the dialogue of the text as is the practice in many published plays.
Arghol strains and stretches elegantly, face over shoulder like a woman.
"Come you fool, have supper." Hanp walks back to the hut, leaving him. (Lewis Enemy of the Stars 65)
Although much of the text appears as prose, a closer look reveals that Lewis’s technique is complicated, as he "develops tension between narrative and drama, word and image, reader and the page" (Graver 492). Most literature does not involve tension between the reader and the page but rather "excludes the reader from its represented world in a way that even the most naturalistic performance do not" (Graver 494). When watching a performance, an audience member, even if the play is interesting, could easily divert their attention away from the world on stage. The better a show is, the more intriguing and likely it will be for an audience to be emerged in the environment of the piece. On the other hand, in order for someone to be reading, they have to be paying attention completely. A reader will be removed form the universe of a novel if they look away from the words. Likewise, the opposite is true, in that if the words are read the book holder will be assimilated into the reality of the text. Enemy of the Stars uses standard prose to ensnare the reader, only to destroy that security with apparent stage directions and other discontinuities from standard prose format:
Hanp comes out of hut, coughing like a goat, rolling a cigarette. He goes to where Arghol is lying. He stirs him with his foot roughly. Arghol strains and stretches elegantly, face over shoulder, like a woman, "Come you fool, and have supper." Hanp walks back to the hut, leaving him. Arghol lies, hands clasped round his knees. This new kick has put him into childish lethargy. He gets to his feet soon, and walks to hut. He puts his hand on Hanp's shoulder, who has been watching him, and kisses him on the cheek.
(Lewis, Enemy of the Stars 100).
This varying pull between the emergence of the reader into the text through narrative comment and dialogue, with the awareness of self when stage directions pull the reader out of the work to question its disjointed nature, makes Enemy of the Stars a Vorticist performance. Enemy of the Stars, through its technique of entrancing and expelling the reader from the reality if its universe, creates a Vorticist tension between self-awareness and emergence into the environment of the play.