Stories and Essays will certainly confirm Loy’s standing as a modernist. Loy directly addresses topics shunned by her forebears or considered anew by her contemporaries, including abortion, aesthetics, avant-gardism, the body, class, consumption, evolution, gender relations, genius, iconoclasm, metaphysics, power, sexuality, subjectivity, transcendence, and war. Artistic and ideological movements like Futurism Imagism, and Dada also make appearances. Loy’s criticism continues these preoccupations, and extends them to figures central to the shaping of modernism such as Brancusi, Braque, Eliot, Havelock Ellis, Freud, Joyce, Lawrence, and Picasso. But more than these ready associations with the modernism to which Loy is so often allied, these works illustrate how Loy gradually came to question twentieth-century mores. Some readers may be surprised to discover Loy taking a religious turn not unlike that of Eliot; while this interest clearly defines “History of Religion and Eros,” it is also apparent in the Socratic dialogue “Mi & Lo,” where Loy’s philosophy, like Plato’s, is informed by the human relationship to the divine. The religiosity of Loy’s late oeuvre does not mesh comfortably with the scabrous hijinks of earlier satirical fictions like “The Stomach”; nor does Loy’s faith sit easily with our presumptions about modernist secularism. But this facet of her writing has only recently begun to be addressed, and is part and parcel of a conversion to Christian Science that Loy enacted well before she started writing (BM 117).9
Just as Loy’s religiosity is not simplistically modernist, it might be argued that there are a number of pieces in this book that reveal a latent Victorianism. “The Crocodile without any Tail” is a children’s fairy tale that ends happily-ever-after; the plot of “The Three Wishes” is virtually Dickensian in scope; Loy’s ballet “Crystal Pantomime” foregrounds a heterosexual relationship potentially disconcerting in its allegiance to stereotypical gender roles. Perhaps worse, Loy occasionally proves intrigued by rendering lower-class dialects to a rather painfully extensive degree. Yet each of these more “traditional” writings contains deliberate, disruptive absurdity; how many character lists of fairy tales, for instance, include children named 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6? At the heart of this nameless naming is a suspicion toward language consistent throughout Loy’s works, resulting in the linguistic play that is the foundation of so much of her originality.
Loy’s concerns about the communicative aspect of language come to the fore in some of the more obscure elements of Stories and Essays, and particularly in her persistent return to the figures of the sphinx and the asterisk, who surface in seven pieces in this collection.10 “The Library of the Sphinx.” is a critique of modernist literature, and begins as follows:
While the sphinx retains her secret, who shall reveal the unconsummated significance of the asterisk—
Notwithstanding that the secret of the sphinx is not conveyed in words — the asterisk is an assumption that the secret is possessed by each of us and therefore need never be mentioned—
the asterisk is the signal of a treasure which is not there.
For the Greeks, sphinxes were gendered female. The most famous sphinx guarded the gates of the city Thebes, asking a riddle of those who wanted to enter; an incorrect answer resulted in death. Robert Sheffield appears to be the only critic thus far to comment upon Loy’s frequent mention of the sphinx in her papers; he quite reasonably claims that “Loy’s point of departure is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the decadent Lord Henry Wotton dismisses women as ‘Sphinxes without secrets.’ ”11 For Loy, a countering feminist aesthetic is at stake. In “Pazzarella,” the female protagonist is alternately likened to a void or an enigma; when she insists that she contains an incommunicable “ ‘secret truth’ ”, her suitor Geronimo retorts that he is the solution to her riddle. Certain that he can see into Pazzarella’s confused “female soul” Geronimo reflects:
In the divine manner, it was from this chaos I drew my inspiration. At once I grew enormous — omnipotent. After centuries of mystery, I had found the solution — a solution that lay in myself. The secret of woman is that she does not yet exist. Being a creator, I realized I can create woman. I decided to “create” Pazzarella.
The sphinx, then, is not silent because ignorant, but because she has yet to formulate herself, let alone her riddle. Via the ancient sphinx, Loy contends that although an extensive history of Western civilisation has already unfolded, women remain in the infancy of their attempts to identify themselves and be recognised. Like any good parody, “Pazzarella” is part cautionary tale: women must express their “secret truth” or be defined yet again.
While Loy’s sphinx implicitly undermines the advances of the first wave of feminism, it notably foresees the identity politics that shaped the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. Loy extends the image of the sphinx to present women’s lack of identity as strength and opportunity. In “Gloria Gammage,” we’re told that the protagonist “keeps a no man’s land of meaning in these sleek stroking corners of her eyes” and that her lover “who will never be able to construe its significance — is anxious that no man else ever shall—”. As Loy’s narrator states, Gloria “[i]n this way — keep[s] the secret — of the Sphinx.” And amid the general hilarity of “All the laughs in one short story by McAlmon,” one woman smiles “sphinxly” and with quiet authority. The contemplative silence signalled by the sphinx corresponds with Loy’s asterisk, “the signal of a treasure which is not there.” While the asterisk can be used to indicate an unsayable obscenity, in Loy’s hands, it denotes a more commonplace inarticulacy, as when, in “The Three Wishes,” she describes a beaten-down couple as follows:
They both seemed only with the years to be scrupulously washing themselves away.
Like millions and millions of us, they were living off a literature that has worn down to asterisks.
Here, the asterisk marks a distinctly melancholic marriage that is devoid of any defining passion. For the sphinx and her followers, absence is secret and potentially powerful; for others, it is an empty wordlessness only obliquely aware of its unfulfilled promise.
The writings in Stories and Essays of Mina Loy contain complexities in terms of content, narrative structure, diction, and punctuation. Confusion arises when the toothless and tailless crocodiles are inexplicably conflated in “The Crocodile without any Tail”. More often, though, this confusion is neither accidental nor gratuitous; for instance, a ferociously disjointed paragraph of dialogue in “Hush Money” concludes with the protagonist’s proud claim that “he could keep up a racing, hurdle-leaping intercourse”—here form and content work symbiotically. Adding to the reader’s perplexity is Loy’s love of coining neologisms: Loy’s word “millionheir” is both apt and consistently used; similarly expressive is the “Introspeculates” of “Mi & Lo”. These terminologies are part and parcel of Loy’s insistent treatment of language as a vital, living thing. Loy retrieves archaic or foreign phrasing and layers it with playful, modern meanings, as when, in “Gate Crashers of Olympus—” she uses the French word for break—casse—as a homophonic allegiance between Picasso and his revolutionary “destruction” of the artistic techniques of his forebears. Still more unusually, Loy has many unorthodox forms of spacing and punctuation, and perhaps most notably, an odd approach to dashes.