Modernism and the Erotics of Style

Abstract

If, as Roland Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), writing can be considered as ‘the science of the various blisses [jouissances] of language, its Kama Sutra’,¹ the question remains open as to whether there is a specifically modernist Kama Sutra. In 1927, Robert Graves and Laura Riding wrote of the ‘general modernist tendency to overcome the distinction between subject-matter and form’² — but does this suggest the possibility of an identifiably modernist ‘erotics of art’, in the sense in which Susan Sontag established this phrase as shorthand for an increased attention to questions of form?³ And how does this erotics relate to the concept of style, itself a highly charged term in modernist discourse? This chapter will explore a representative selection of modernist texts from the genres of prose and poetry in order to argue that modernist eroticism is contingent on its highly self-conscious relationship to its own stylistic expectations — and that it is precisely this stylistic tension that renders it both erotic and modernist.